The hardest part of vacationing, for me, isn’t the crowds or the time in airports, or long lines at travel destinations. That’s what I have an iPhone for, anyway, right? Killing time? What’s most difficult in my world is the deal searching. Getting the best hotel, car, airfare deals is tricky and time consuming, and I just wish I could hand it all off to an assistant and be done with it.
Fortunately, there is an app to help with this sort of thing.
Lots of us like to listen to audiobooks, and lots of us buy ebooks across a variety of services and devices. If you own an iPad, for instance, you might download audio books from iTunes or iBooks from that particular app, and then read right on your iPad. If you want to listen to iBooks, or have a visual impairment that makes it tough to see the text on the iPad screen, you can turn on VoiceOver and have the iBook read to you.
What about the Mac, you might ask? Can’t you just turn on VoiceOver on the Mac and have it read ebooks to you? Not if you use an e-Reader software like Kindle or Nook, you can’t. There is a way to get your Mac to read Kindle books to you, out loud, with its built-in text to speech software, but it’s not as intuitive as you might think. Here’s how.
Packing for an upcoming vacation can be a last-minute affair in which all the important items are left behind at home. With our busy schedules and long to-do lists, it’s rare that we get time to think about all the things we’ll need while traveling to that exotic location, or even just heading home to see the folks. Either way, using a list to be sure we remember all that we need is a smart idea, but I’m guessing that many folks don’t get that far, or, like me, have a congenital aversion to tiny slips of paper.
However, using an iPhone app is ever so much cooler, and it actually helps us stay organized. With an app like Packing Pro – or it’s little brother, Packing – you’ll be able to save time AND stay organized. What a concept, right?
Terminal has tons of great applications on the Mac. By accessing the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X, Terminal allows power users and newbies alike to do things with their Mac that may not be enabled out of the box.
Code monkeys and script jockeys frequently use Terminal to run longer processes than typical, like compiling code (the process of making all those little lines of code into an app that will run on your Mac) or running scripts. When they finish, they finish. There’s no built in way to know that they’re done.
Speaking at an interview at D: All Things Digital today with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Apple CEO Tim Cook hinted at some new directions for Siri.
“I think you’re going to be pleased with where we’re taking Siri.” Cook alluded to more breadth from the voice-enabled assistant, as well as admitting that there is more the technology could do.
During his interview at the D10 conference today, Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked point blank by Kara Swisher about how Apple plans to change television.
He replied by praising the current set-top box Apple sells for $100. The Apple TV sold 2.8 million units last year and 2.7 million this year. “It’s an area of intense interest for us,” said Cook, “It’s not a fifth leg of the stool. It’s not the same size as the phone or Mac or tablet business.”
Walt Mossberg, co-interviewer, asked directly if Apple could just make a box and continue leaving the panel to others. Cook replied, “Can we control the key technology? Can we make a significant contribution far beyond what others have done in this area?” That’s the question Apple asks, and Cook seemed to be very interested in what the future may hold for his company’s future contributions.
Tim Cook took a moment at the D10 conference today to defend Apple’s reliance on supply chains and its willingness to micromanage them when they fall short of expectations.
Cook said that no one else is measuring working hours in China, nor reporting on it. “We took a position to say we want to bring this down,” he said. “We’re measuring working hours for 700,000 people.”
Talking with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher today at the D: All Things Digital conference, Tim Cook explained why the iPad wasn’t the same as the Mac.
“The tablet is different,” said Cook. “It can do things that aren’t encumbered by what the PC was. We didn’t invent the tablet market, we invented the modern tablet.”
Spotify updated its universal iOS app today with some new features, including push notifications. The app store description says it all:
What’s New in Version 0.5.1
• New: Push notifications. Receive notifications when your subscribed playlists are updated, you get new subscribers, and more. You can choose which notifications to receive in Settings.
• New: Intro guide for new users.
• Fixed: Missing retina graphics on log in screen (iPad).
• Fixed: Retina album art is now always synced when you offline sync playlists.
• Fixed: App could sometimes become unresponsive after scrolling and navigating at the same time.
• Other improvements to Facebook login, screen locking when offline syncing, performance and stability.
Spotify, last updated on May 2 and available in 15 different countries, allows access (for subscribers) to its Premium music service on iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. There’s a two-day trial available for free, after which you’ll have to choose a Premium plan or cancel. You’ll still be able to listen to wirelessly sync songs from your Mac, edit playlists, and see Spotify’s catalog of music without a subscription, but you won’t be able to stream to your iOS device.
Source: iTunes App Store Via: iPad Insight
So, you may be thinking of traveling to far off places this summer, blithely jetting off to other countries, bringing your iPhone hither and yon to take pictures, check email, call your friends to brag about the nice weather, and play some Angry Birds while on the long plane rides. Unfortunately, using that beautiful iPhone in other countries could see you coming home with more that just a sunburn and jet lag.
If you use your iPhone and access its network capabilities, you could be seeing a bill of hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. Here’s how to avoid having to take out a second mortgage to pay your bill.
Sure would be great to listen to every day documents easily, say, on a long drive or airplane commute. There are a ton of ways to make this happen, including some third party apps, but this is a pretty slick, easy way to turn any text you can highlight into spoken text that can be put on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod, ready to go along with you.
Apple introduced Reminders alongside iOS 5 and Siri (for the iPhone 4S) this past October, and while the world wasn’t exactly stunned, the app made an impression. The trick with any app, of course, is finding ways to use it efficiently.
Below are five of the best tips we’ve found to help you use this simple app more effectively, all in one place for your viewing pleasure. We tried to make sure that we focused on features that all iPhone owners could use, so as not to leave out those who haven’t upgraded to the 4S just yet.
Convergence. It’s all the rage, lately, and what better two items to converge than your Mac, running OS X, and your iPad (or iPhone, or iPod touch), running iOS? IT’s two great tastes that taste great together, to quote an old commercial that mostly no one has heard of any more.
With these five tips, you’ll amaze your friends with a Mac that looks more like your iPad than it does your Mac. So, read on, intrepid souls, and follow our steps to make that sweet Apple computer into something resembling the post-PC magical device we all love.
Not only does Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster see Apple’s and its investors’ financial outlook as essentially rosy for the foreseeable future, but he’s taking it one step further. He’s convinced that he has at least ten reasons to stay bullish on Apple stock over the next three years. He also thinks the stock price is going to hit $1000 per share.
Rich King Casting is looking for people to work on a “movie in Silicon Valley / Palo Alto based on Steven Jobs.” The casting company is looking for folks with that quintessential seventies look, with “longish hair, sideburns etc.”
In addition, if you have a car that was around in 1965 to 1973, the’d be interested in checking them out as well. The Craigslist ad also promises “Pay when working and meals included,” which sounds like a fantastic deal to me.
Auction house Sothebys has just posted a memo written by Steve Jobs to his co-workers at Atari, where he worked before starting Apple. The memo was written to his then-supervisor Stephen Bristow, and suggested changes Jobs had for Atari’s World Cup Soccer arcade game to extend the shelf life for arcade owners.
Funnily enough, while the memo is typed on Atari letterhead, it includes a stamp with the name of Steve’s company, “All-One Farm Design” and the address of the garage in which he and friend Steve Wozniak would soon create history with Apple Computer. Imagine if he’d gone ahead with designing farms?
Some people are never satisfied. They are always searching for the app that brings just the tiniest advantage to their daily workflow. People like this might not want to just stick with the Reminders app that’s bundled in with iOS 5, no. They might want to try an alternative. One such alternative is NotifyMe. Let us tell you a bit more about it.
After a long week of tips on how to make your Mac look more like iOS, how about a tip on how to make it ACT more like iOS?
On the iPhone, it’s become de rigueur to use a tap and pull to refresh motion. I first noticed it with the Twitter apps, and now more and more apps are using this style of refresh. I wish I was able to do it on my Mac. Oh, wait, I can – at least in my browser. Here’s how.
Finding apps in the App Store can be daunting. Sure, you can use the search function, or the Top Ten lists there, but still, with over 500,000 apps just sitting there waiting to be downloaded, it takes a lot of wading to find the true gems. That’s why Apple started their promotional areas in iTunes, to help consumers find quality apps and games. The New and Noteworthy section, the Hot Apps section, and the more recent iPhone and iPad App of the Week features call out the best of the best, in Apple’s eyes, at least. Now they’ve gone and added a new way to help you find the cream of the crop in their much lauded store: Free App of the Week.
Congrats, commenter munpip214! You’ve won the contest! Enjoy your newfound fame!
So, this image is fairly clear, right? A ton of iPads, all charging with some charging ephemera in the background, none of them out of the plastic wrap that iPads come in. The poster on G+, Google’s social network, is Cameron Brower. What he does is anyone’s guess, but we found this image to be rather sublime, and just crying out for a clever caption. His comment on it? “I hope I never see an iPad again.” Now, it’s your turn.
Reminder lists rock, right? They let us track of all the things we need to do, access the lists on an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or even in iCal on our Mac. Yet, wouldn’t it be slick if we could share, say, a shopping list with our husband or wife? Share a list of things to get done for a particular work project with our team members? What about set lists with the other folks in our disco band? That would be cool, right? It turns out that this is fairly simple yet not that intuitive to do.
When Launchpad first rocketed (sorry) onto the scene in Mac OS X Lion, most people were firmly in the “hate it” or “love it” camp. There didn’t seem to be much in between, but maybe that’s just due to the contentious nature of the internets. Regardless, today’s tip is firmly in the “love it” camp, showing you how to clean up Launchpad, add in just the Apps you want to use, and then a quick trick for clearing the background to show off that cool iOS-like Earth from space picture.
Yahoo announced tonight the launch of its new search platform, Axis. The idea here is that users can search the web using their iPad, iPhone or computer and then pick up that search when they move from one device to the next. It’s a cool idea, and one that we hope other search companies pick up soon.
Yahoo is touting Axis as a one-step search solution, allowing users to visually search the web from any other web page without having to leave that page to search. The visual layout on the app looks a lot like the Pulse News app, with previews of web search destination sites listed in swipe-able rows on a black background.
You’ve seen Stephen Spielberg’s film, Minority Report, right? Tom Cruise’s character stands in front of virtual screens, puts on a pair of gloves, and manipulates the data and the memories without touching a thing. Well, the super brains at MIT’s media lab have taken the first step toward that reality, using Apple’s magical device as a display screen and a special glove/attachment combo to interact with it.
The video the group has released shows some pretty fancy stuff, drawing objects in 3D real time, and then manipulating them in collaboration with others. There’s even some slick Minority Report-style interface there, with researches moving red and blue rectangles around in the virtual space they’ve created on the iPad.
Ever wanted to check out the ghost of your city past? Interested in experiencing the history of the spaces around you? Well, you just may be able to do that with this free app from Enlighten Ventures, LLC.